Professional Documents
Culture Documents
♦ Sometimes when you are reporting what people say or believe, you don´t know, or you
don´t want to say, who exactly the `people´ are. So you use an impersonal construction:
People believe that thousands of birds died.
The same idea can be expressed by using the passive in two different ways:
a) subject + passive of reporting verb + `to´ infinitive
Hundreds of thousands of birds are believed to have died.
b) It + passive of reporting verb + that + clause
It is believed that hundreds of thousands of birds died.
○ Some other reporting verbs that can be used in this way are:
calculate, claim, consider, discover, estimate, expect, feel, hope, know, prove, report,
say, show, think, understand, etc.